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La literatura sobre estructura productiva y crecimiento económico muestra la relevancia de la industria en la expansión del PIB en países desarrollados y en desarrollo. Estudios recientes indican que el sector de los servicios modernos (servicios profesionales) contribuye a la innovación, al aumento de la productividad y, en consecuencia, al crecimiento económico. Este artículo plantea una discusión teórica sobre la importancia del sector de los servicios modernos para América Latina a fin de actualizar la tesis central del enfoque estructuralista latinoamericano. Los datos indican que, aun en el contexto de una transformación productiva caracterizada por una menor participación de la manufactura y el auge del sector terciario, se perpetúa la división internacional del trabajo, sobre la base de la relación centro-periferia. Los resultados muestran que el pensamiento estructuralista resulta adecuado para explicar el persistente subdesarrollo de los países latinoamericanos desde una perspectiva centrada en la economía de servicios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the latent crisis situation that has existed in Latin America for several decades. Average per capita growth rates over a long period of time in most Latin American countries are between 0 and 2%. Since the 1980s and 1990s, the trend towards stagnation has not been explained in the same way in the large Latin American countries. While there are common causes, the weight of each factor differs. This article sets out the various theories on the trend towards economic stagnation. Its originality is that not only does it underline the role of inequalities in income and wealth and deindustrialization, but it also stresses the causes of economic volatility and its consequences on the low average per capita growth rate, which is particularly pronounced in some countries. Contrary to a relatively shared idea, these economies have been little or not emerging from 1990 to now, except between 2000-2012 more and less. They have therefore not converged, or only to a limited extent, towards the per capita income level of the advanced countries, unlike many Asian countries. Latin American countries are experiencing several crises at the same time, which feed of each other. The crisis is deep. It is structural as it calls to question the very modes of expansion of capitalism in recent decades. Therefore, only responses at this level can make it possible to overcome the obstacles to sustainable development, to the inclusion of those, the majority, who are rejected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The causes presented in the literature of the middle-income trap are generic, emphasizing the quality of the legal institutions of the country, demographic problems, the lack of social infrastructure, poor macroeconomic policies, etc. were already present in developing countries when they were growing fast. Besides, the income interval used on the studies on the trap was too large. • Instead of promoting the growth, the liberalizing reforms, which were more radical in Latin America than in Asia, caused an increase in the interest rate and dismantled the mechanism that neutralized the Dutch disease – both facts leading to the chronic overvaluation of the exchange rate, which represented a competitive disadvantage of the companies utilizing the best technology available. • In the economic literature, it is well established that the currencies of the commodity-focused economies tend to be appreciated in the long run because they face the Dutch disease. On the other hand, central banks in the region tend to define a high interest rate around which they organize their monetary policy so as to attract foreign capital and "grow with external savings" – this representing a second major cause of overvaluation of the national currencies of Latin American countries. • The main conclusion of the research is that, in the period of 1980–2016, the Latin American countries didn't fall into middle-income but a liberalization trap; the reason why they have fallen into quasi-stagnation while Asian countries did not lie in the liberal reforms. Opening trade in countries that have the Dutch disease meant dismantling the pragmatic mechanisms that neutralized it; financial liberalization limited the ability of countries to control distorted flows of capital and created conditions for the increase in the interest rate. • The instrument to neutralize the Dutch disease on the domestic market side were import tariffs on manufactured goods. To the extent that they were just neutralizing the Dutch disease, they were not protectionist – they were just giving the local manufacturing industry equal conditions of competition with the companies of other countries. If the import tariffs on manufactured goods were higher than what was required to neutralize the Dutch disease, they would be also protectionist. This paper offers an alternative explanation to the slow-down observed in the growth of developing countries. Instead of a middle-income trap what happened was a liberalization trap. Growth didn't happen because countries turned middle-income, but happened in a given period, around the 1980s, when these countries faced a serious foreign debt crisis and were constrained to open their economies. The studies on the middle-income trap have adopted a broad income interval and were unable to offer new historical facts that explained why these countries stop growing fast. Differently, this paper shows that the trade liberalization and the financial liberalization that started in the 1980s involved the dismantling of the mechanism that neutralized the Dutch disease and the change from low to high interest rates – both facts leading to a long-term or chronic overvaluation of the exchange rate that made the manufacturing industry non-competitive and caused deindustrialization and low growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class identity is a key mechanism in the explanation of class-based collective action. For decades, this was particularly relevant in Latin America, where objective class inequality was persistent and there was a long history of collective action, originating in the workplace and expressed through unions and labor parties. Despite persistent inequalities in the region, since the 1990s scholars increasingly claimed that the relation between objective class position and subjective class identification weakened significantly, and that class dynamics centered on work were no longer central to explain group formation and collective action among the popular sectors. While in countries like Argentina scholars have explained these processes by focusing on the effects of the de-industrialization of the economy and the informalization of the job market, in Chile analysts have done so by emphasizing the growth of the service sector and the emergence of a middle-class society where ‘old-fashioned’ working-class identities have become irrelevant. This article questions these arguments based on a comparative analysis of the relationship between objective class position and subjective class identification in Argentina and Chile in 2009. The results show that class still matters. In both countries, people with a working-class position or a working-class trajectory are significantly more likely to uphold working-class identity than individuals with a privileged class position or trajectory. Surprisingly, the authors’ analysis also demonstrates that the overall rates of working-class identification are higher in Chile than in Argentina. The authors explain these unexpected results by looking at contemporary class-related phenomena (e.g. higher inequality and economic concentration in Chile) and longer-term class dynamics (particularly differences stemming from the ‘radical’ party–union configuration in Chile and the state-corporatist incorporation of labor in Argentina). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mining production has grown substantially in Latin America in the last decades. This boom has adversely affected the negatively the production and exports of manufacturing goods, suggesting the basis for the phenomena of the “Dutch Disease”. This study allows ratifying that incidence through a regression model with panel data and a graphical analysis using local polynomial regressions. Results show a trade off in production and exports between two important sectors, industry and mining. The negative relationship operates in countries where exports of mining goods exceed a certain threshold, wich is the moment at which economic institutions should set off the alarms and intervene on a more active way. This research has named “Intersectoral Substitution Curve” ISC to this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship among trade liberalization, deindustrialization, and income inequality in the more industrially advanced Latin American countries. It argues that, among the most important liberal reforms implemented during the 1980s and 1990s, trade reform was especially detrimental to equality because it accelerated deindustrialization. The analysis provides evidence to support this mechanism. Therefore, as the liberalization of trade increased, the deindustrialization process produced an increase in inequality. In short, evidence shows how the process of economic integration to the global market, as it took place, produced an increase in inequality through the destruction of formal employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been considerable concern in Latin America over the implications of increased competition from China for local industry. These concerns include the possibility of “deindustrialization,” the increased “primarization” of the region's exports and the difficulties of upgrading manufactured exports into higher technology products. This article examines the impact of Chinese competition both in the domestic market and in export markets on Brazilian industry. It documents the increased penetration of Chinese manufactures in the Brazilian market and the way in which Brazilian exports have lost market share to China in the US, European Union and four Latin American countries. Brazil, because of its more developed and locally integrated industrial sector, is not typical of other Latin American countries and the article also discusses the relevance of the Brazilian experience for the region as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article present a project proposal to the Ford Foundation which analyzes the financial instability and overvaluation of the exchange rate in Latin America, particularly Brazil. It mentions that the main objectives of the project is to explore the changes in the world economy and Latin America in consequence of the global financial crisis and the nature of financial crises. The relationship between financial instability, exchange rate an deindustrialization in Brazil is also tackled.

The industrialization of developing countries has fundamentally transformed work, employment, and labor for millions. Despite the industrialization of most of the developing world, we present evidence that Latin America has experienced stagnating industrial employment in the past few decades. Benefiting from recently available data on industrial employment as a percentage of total employment from 1980 through 2006, we analyze fixed-effects models for 20 Latin American countries. Specifically, we examine three theoretical explanations: productivity/comparative advantage, institutionalism, and dependency/world-systems. Our analyses demonstrate that the prevailing productivity/comparative advantage explanation has limited value. By contrast, we find supportive evidence for a combination of institutional and dependency/world-systems variables. In particular, the stagnating industrial employment share in Latin American countries has been driven by the negative effects of (in order of magnitude) the Mercosur trade agreement, mineral and ore exports (as a percentage of total exports), the duration of the current political regime, military spending (as a percentage of GDP), and inward foreign direct investment flows (as a percentage of GDP). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Neoliberalism in Latin America. Neoliberalism and globalization had decisive influence in shaping public policies both internal and foreign in Latin America. Less state, trade and market freedoms, social goals subordinated to economic criteria, are part and parcel of the neoliberal utopia. Price stability was erected as the main social objective; import substitution resulted replaced by exports as the main source of growth. The neoliberal net results as applied to Latin America are: less growth, deindustrialization, income concentration and precarious employments. Therefore, countries public policies should try to gain autonomy to use jointly markets and public intervention in a constructive and innovative fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]